


Young Buck

by downjune



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: M/M, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Recovery, Self-Sest, Unrequited Love, World War II Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2020-10-28 15:54:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20781158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/downjune/pseuds/downjune
Summary: Steve popped back into existence on the platform right on schedule—or at least he appeared to. But the figure that returned arrived in a heap, moaning in pain. Bucky’s heart dropped into his stomach.





	Young Buck

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seinmit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seinmit/gifts).

> Hey, better late than not at all, right? Seinmit, this isn't _quite_ your self-sest prompt, but it's pretty darn close, I feel. I hope you like it!

Steve popped back into existence on the platform right on schedule—or at least he appeared to. But the figure that returned arrived in a heap, moaning in pain. Bucky’s heart dropped into his stomach. 

Both he and Sam leapt onto the platform, but “Steve!” died on his lips when Sam got there first and rolled the figure over onto his back. It wasn’t Steve who’d returned to them, familiar shield strapped to his back. Bucky’s own battered face stared up at him

And the world tipped sideways.

*

His other self was barely coherent, pain and blood loss and blind terror all clouding his mind. Bucky watched himself thrash even as Bruce sedated him and tried to set the bone of his ruined arm. He watched from the loft in Tony Stark’s lake house and thought many times about climbing out the skylight, but he kept a firm grip on the wood railing, swallowed his gag reflex, and stood his ground. Despite the cold truth of what Steve had done.

“He needs a hospital,” Bruce said. He’d turned the large living area into a field hospital with Sam’s help, though with Bucky bleeding on it, the couch was probably a lost cause. “I don’t think that arm can be saved without surgery. He’s already lost circulation in his fingers—see the color’s off. Not to mention the frostbite. I’d say he'd been hypothermic for at least a few hours before Cap—”

Bruce cut himself off. It was the only explanation—Steve had sent Bucky back to the future instead of returning. Bucky himself didn’t remember much of the fall or the time immediately after, but that was his Howling Commandos uniform, and that was his mangled left arm before HYDRA had sawed it off. 

This was a version of Bucky far closer to whole than Bucky currently felt. Steve had marooned himself in the past, in enemy territory, so that this Bucky wouldn’t be taken and swallowed by HYDRA. 

Bucky hated him so much he could hardly breathe enough to speak. 

“Take the arm,” he managed to bite out. “It’ll go septic otherwise.” His had. They’d waited to see how his body would fight infection even after cutting it off. Whatever HYDRA version of the serum he had in him had taken care of it eventually.

Both Bruce and Sam looked up at him now as though they’d forgotten he was still here. The original. Or was he? What of James Buchanan Barnes was left compared to the man on the couch? Compared to the Bucky Barnes down there, Bucky was a shadow. A husk. A stitched-together patchwork of a human man. 

“Medicine has come a long way since the forties, man,” Sam said uneasily. “I don’t think we should just—”

“The arm is fucked,” he said. “Trust me.”

Bruce shook his head. “I’m calling for a consult before I hack off anybody’s arm, even somebody who technically already lost it.”

Bucky didn’t go out the skylight, because that would’ve involved breaking something. Instead he opened a window and climbed out onto the porch roof to quietly lose his shit. 

*

The consult saved the arm. Dr. Strange was both a wizard and a former surgeon, apparently, so he brought his friend Christine through one of his spinning portals, and she took Bucky back to the city with her to an actual OR. Bruce went with her.

Sam stayed.

“I won’t ask if you’re okay, ‘cause clearly you’re not,” he said, approaching Bucky where he sat with his feet in the water off the end of Stark’s dock. Bucky frowned at the tanned tops of his feet and shook his head. He missed Wakanda and the hours he’d spent soaking up sunshine and heat and stillness. He’d felt untouchable in Wakanda.

“I don’t know what I am, but yeah—not okay.”

“Steve’s not coming back, is he.”

Which was when it occurred to Bucky that Sam might not be okay, either. He shifted around to see Sam’s eyes trained on his tennis shoes as he methodically unlaced them, lined them up on the dock, and rolled up the pantlegs of his jeans.

“I don’t think so, no,” Bucky finally said.

“You think that was the plan all along?”

“I thought maybe. The way he looked at Stark’s funeral—the way he talked about Romanoff, after.” Bucky shrugged. “I think he wanted out.”

“He sent back the shield.”

“Yeah.”

“That probably means he’s okay, right? Retiring?”

“How should I know, man?” Bucky said. He looked out at the lake. “He sent back his shield attached to me. What the hell does _that_ mean?”

*

His younger self returned to the lake outfitted with a cast and a sling, his eyes wide as dinner plates and wary as a kicked dog’s. For the first time since he’d landed on that platform, he looked at Bucky and knew him.

“You’re—”

“You.” Bucky crossed his arms over his chest, the Wakandan prosthetic covered by a jacket. 

“You’re still alive. You gotta be a hundred years old.”

“A hundred and six, actually.”

His younger self looked Bucky up and down. “Am I gonna live to be a hundred and six?”

“Good diet and exercise…you might,” he answered, then smirked, and his younger self twitched an answering smile that hit Bucky right in the chest. The bitterness and resentment in his heart dissipated like the air from a burst balloon. This Bucky’s hair flopped over his forehead and he stood in a way Bucky hadn’t remembered until this moment. How many decades since he’d stood like that, with his hips just like that?

Warmth rushed through him, and he had to turn away. He retreated to the dock to look at the water some more, but Bucky followed. Where else was he going to go?

“What’re we gonna do now?” the kid—because he felt like a kid—asked. 

Bucky offered a lopsided shrug. “You can do whatever you want. You’re a Howling Commando back from the dead. You’re a hero.”

“So what are you?”

“I’m an enemy of the state.” Bucky stepped right to the edge, but he didn’t feel like a dip, so the kid had him cornered.

“What’d you do?”

“Google it.”

Silence fell around them for a bit, except for water lapping at the dock. Sam and Bruce had left them alone, the bastards. “You think I could go back?” the kid finally asked. 

Bucky’s chest tightened, and he pressed his lips together in a line. “Yeah, you could probably swing that.”

“Steve, he—I don’t remember—I was too—” He cut himself off. “I don’t know what he would want me to do.”

“He wanted to keep HYDRA away from you. He couldn’t the first time around, so he took his second chance.” Bucky didn’t know what that made him, here in 2023. Was this kid the new and improved Bucky Barnes, without all the Soviet baggage, or were they both still in hot water with the US government? 

“What are we gonna do without ‘im?” the kid asked with a crooked smile.

“You’re gonna get the hell over him because, unfortunately, the guy is straight as an arrow.” Bucky felt his younger self stiffen beside him on the dock. 

“The hell?”

Bucky turned to regard him and squinted in the morning sunlight. The kid had gone white in the face. “What, you’re gonna be embarrassed that I know we were in love with him for years? I forgot for a while, but seein’ your face is bringing it all back.”

“Screw you,” the kid said weakly.

Bucky shrugged. “Yeah, whatever.”

“Does anybody else know?”

“Nobody still alive.” 

“Jesus.” He rubbed his shoulder, glared at Bucky, and retreated back to the house.

Bucky gave the kid a week before he started sniffing around for Pym particles to get him back home. To Steve. Poor sap.

*

“I think he meant it for you.” Bucky pressed the shield into Sam’s hands. “Not me. And not the kid.”

“No way, man. You’re his best friend. He risked everything for you.” Sam tried to give it back to him, but Bucky held his hands up, palms out. 

“Well, he didn’t leave a note, and even if he had, I don’t want it. I’m going back to Wakanda, Sam.”

Sam clutched the shield, and Bucky felt a perverse twist of happiness that Sam cared enough about him to look upset. “Shit. You leaving for good?”

“I’m holding out for a pardon,” he said with a shrug. “Can’t say I wanna spend the rest of my life in a box on the Raft.”

“Can’t say I blame you,” Sam admitted, looking down at the shield in his hands. “What’s the other you gonna do?”

“Beats me. You and he could make a good team.” He phrased it like a question, but Sam laughed and shook his head. 

“I already had to educate a guy from the 40s once—I’m not sure I’m up for another round.” The pain in his voice told Bucky that the wound of Steve’s departure was still way too fresh. “I’m not sure he’s down for the hero gig, anyway. Dude’s got a thousand-yard stare I’d recognize from about that far out.”

Bucky nodded. “Yeah.”

“You could take him with you. We gotta get out of Pepper’s hair—out of her house. I gotta see if I still have a life in DC.”

Bucky clasped Sam’s shoulder and gave it a gentle shake, not sure what he should say. They’d both followed Steve until they couldn’t anymore. The choice to leave him hadn’t been theirs. Figuring out what to do after would take time. 

“I’ll be back for the next interplanetary threat, don’t worry,” he finally said.

Sam huffed another laugh. “I wasn’t until you said that.”

*

Bruce had gone back to Manhattan, Sam to DC. T’Challa was sending a jet to pick Bucky up and take him to Wakanda in the morning, so he spent his last night in Stark’s house on the couch staring at the ceiling. The quiet footsteps of his younger self didn’t startle him as he approached.

The kid leaned his hip against the side of the couch by Bucky’s feet, so Bucky moved them in case he wanted to sit. “Pre-travel jitters?” Bucky finally asked.

“Yeah.”

“You decide where you’re goin’?” 

The silhouette of the kid’s head twitched in a nod. “Yeah.” But he didn’t offer an answer right away. Finally, he crossed his good arm over his busted one and rubbed at it. Bucky guessed that accelerated healing ached like a son-of-a-bitch right about now.

“How’d you quit?” the kid finally asked.

“Quit what?”

“Wanting him. How is it not drivin’ you crazy every second?”

Bucky pillowed one hand behind his head. Unlike his HYDRA arm, the vibranium one didn’t glint in low light. It seemed to absorb light where it lay across his stomach. “That’s easy,” he said. “HYDRA burned every memory of him out of my brain. Along with every other feeling of happiness or desire or love.”

“Oh.”

Yeah, _Oh_.

“Well, I don’t think I need to go that far.”

Bucky laughed before he could stop himself. “Me neither.”

“They, uh.” The kid dug his fingers through his hair, combing it roughly off his forehead. “They got me. HYDRA. Before Steve came in, guns blazing. They had me.”

Bucky’s stomach rolled.

“I don’t remember much. But I’m not—I know I’m not who I was.”

Words stuck in Bucky’s throat half-formed. He felt scraped out on the inside, incapable of pulling together what a normal person would say to comfort somebody like him. Them. “They don’t have you now,” he managed. 

“Right. I know.” The kid nodded jerkily. “Still feels like it when I shut my eyes, though.”

Bucky shifted over instinctively. “You want the inside or the outside.”

The kid hesitated only a beat. “Inside.” He climbed right over the arm of the couch. “I feel like I’ve been in so long, I don’t know how to sleep alone anymore,” he said. “You know? I miss all the snoring.”

Bucky wished he could remember the sound of the Commandos all sleeping in a pile. He had the idea of it more than anything sensory, but he said, “Yeah,” anyway. Then he moved his pillow to the other end, so the kid could lie with his back to the cushions and his bad arm up instead of underneath him. 

The couch was deep, but not so much that they could fit without touching, and the kid didn’t even try. He wedged his knee between Bucky’s and his good arm under Bucky’s ribs. Then he took a shuddering breath and let it out on a laugh. “Christ.”

They lay there, not sleeping, legs shifting against each other’s, for several long minutes before the kid asked quietly, “Does it still feel like you won’t want anybody ever again? Like if somebody touches you, you’ll crawl outta your skin?” His breath puffed against Bucky’s mouth as he spoke.

Bucky shook his head. “No. Mostly, no.”

“That’s good.”

The silence that fell then was heavier, weighted with some question this younger version of him wanted to ask. “What is it?” Bucky finally said.

“You been with anybody since?” he said, trying for casual and failing by a mile.

“Why’re you asking me that?”

“You haven’t, have you.”

“I haven’t really had the chance,” Bucky said, not sure if he should feel defensive in front of himself. “Too much running and hiding and shooting. And the world almost ended a couple weeks ago, for the second time.” No, not defensive. Amused maybe. “Why?” he asked again.

“Because I really wanna feel something good right now, and if it’s you, then…”

Bucky ran through what his logic would have been eighty years ago, before everything of his own was erased. “If it’s me, it’s not another guy. You know, as I understand it, our situation isn’t that big a deal anymore. There’s apps for this kind of thing.”

“What the hell are apps?”

“Hell if I know,” Bucky answered and hooked his arm around the kid’s waist. “I don’t have a cell phone.”

With a rough sound, the kid quit talking and rocked up against him. The hand beneath Bucky’s ribs clutched at him, and before he had long to wonder if he’d go for it, they were kissing. The strangeness of it was a distant thing. This Bucky moved and spoke and smiled in a way Bucky himself had long since forgotten. Bucky’s own Brooklyn accent was gone. Any ease he’d felt in his body—gone. Or reclaimed to be something different than it had been.

Pressure and friction still did the trick, though. He was hard in his sweats, and so was Bucky. Buck? James? Bucky needed something better to call him than ‘kid.’ He wasn’t a kid any more than Bucky had been in his place all those years ago. 

“God, fuck—” he swore and bit at Bucky’s jaw, his hips stuttering. “I like the beard,” he gasped. “And the hair. Couldn’a had that in the army.”

Bucky touched him everywhere, even reaching down between their bodies to cup his dick. It was his own but not. 

Maybe his younger self should be Bucky and he should be someone else. Did he feel like James? 

They grabbed and clutched at each other, and as fucks went, it wasn’t the most artful, but he couldn’t exactly compare this to any other sex he’d had. The last sex he’d had, was also the last sex his younger self’d had. 

The possibility of never wanting anybody ever again didn’t seem so grim when he ducked his head, kissed his own throat right where he’d always liked, and breathed roughly through their orgasm.

*

They settled in to sleep at opposite ends of the couch, but as Bucky was finally drifting of, a hand on his knee pulled him back.

“I don’t wanna go back—to the Commandos.” To Steve.

“Yeah?” Bucky prompted.

“I want to go with you. See where we end up.”

He smiled to in the dark. “Sure, Buck.” 

The silence that followed was heavy. It was what Steve had called them, but neither needed to explain that.

“Good,” Buck said.

end.


End file.
